It is not easy to explain what Google Wave is about. It is clear what it is not: Another social software tool. It is an collaborative environment. Just watch this Demo of SAP Gravity.
Archive for the 'Lotus Notes' Category
An answer from LotusLive support regarding my request:
Danke für Ihre LotusLive Supportanfrage. Support ist zur Zeit nur in Englisch verfügbar. Wir prüfen, Technischen Support in weiteren Sprachen in Zukunft anzubieten. Wir haben Ihre Anfrage maschinell auf Englisch übersetzt, konnten jedoch keine passenden Antworten finden. Wir bitten Sie, Ihre Support Anfrage in Englisch an support@lotuslive.com zu senden und wir werden Sie weiter unterstützen.
Englische Übersetztung Ihrer Anfrage:
Hello Lotus Support
two concerns torment me:
1. I would like to edit my account information and my password does not work, alternatively, I’ve forgotten. If I reset the password, although I have noticed that an email was sent to me, but it depends on none. Also in the SPAM filter does not matter.
2. My client has established a space on Lotus Live, and I can not add, since I’m already registered. Why, exactly, he can not add an existing account?
My e-mail address is the address of registration:
Thanks for fast support
Greeting
Alexander Kluge
I love translation bots. And I do understand why there is no standard solution for that problem – nobody would ever understand this.
Everybody talks about cloud services. Everyday we receive new cloud offerings from all big vendors. And the marketing machineries work very well – at least customers are testing the offerings more and more.
So does mine. Big company, very blue and yellow deciders. And yellow consultants. Conclusion: We will look at LotusLive first.
IBM opened a virtual space for my customer. We started configuring the service and added our team members. All team members? No. There is just one team member that will stay outside the cloud. It´s me.
The reason is simple. All members were new members to LotusLive. Except me. Unfortunatly I did not want to pay for the LotusLive service, so my test account expired and now we were not able to add my email adress:
Remember: We are in Germany and this messages tells the admin to call a US number. Of course he can not call US number from his business phone.
Meanwhile I tried to log in with my old data. Fail. I was told username and password are wrong. So I tried to recover my password, entered my email adress – and was told that my account will be reset immediatly and I will receive a new password. This was about 6 hours ago. Still no email from LotusLive.
So I decided to write to support@lotuslive.com, of course in german, because the User Interface is in german so I was sure there is german speaking support staff on the other site. Then I received an automated response from an account named “ASC”, email adress “ASC@virtela.com”. Who the hell is “Virtela” I thought:
Oha, it´s the LotusLive support, answering in english. This was 11:27 local time. Still there is no answer from what they call the “Sebior support”.
IBM, if you want to play with the others in the cloud, you should care about this. If you offer the service world wide in local language, then you need to support this language. Without toll numbers in the US but with toll free local numbers. If you want to sell that stuff, you should be fast answering problems from test companies. They might change to another provider in the clouds. Its just one mouse click away.
The last two weeks I had the chance to play around with Google Wave. Since Google Wave was announced I was very curious. Wave seemed to be the next big step for an integrated communication application.
When I first looked at IBMs Activity Explorer more than 3 years ago I was very enthusiastic about the new approach of communication and collaboration. Very good idea to have synchronous and asynchronous communication in one place, add documents and notes and work with others on presentations and project plans. But when I started to work with Activity Explorer I realized it is not easy to cope with this new kind of integrated desktop. It was a lot of information in one place at the same time. And as IBM released it, it was slow and more a kind of prototype for building the Eclipse based Notes 8 client. Unfortunatly the degree of integration of chat, email, documents, etc. in Notes 8 is still not what I expected after working with the prototype years ago. Still you live in your inbox, Activity Explorer and Sametime live somewhere in the sidebar. Yes, I know, there are lots of context right mouse click menus, there is persistent chats and much more – but still things feel not as integrated as I expected it to be.
Now, with Google Wave, you have everything in one place. And you have it real-time. No matter if you are in a chat, work on a document or hold a meeting – everything what you do is real-time. Your co-workers see what you are doing right now in that specific document (you can turn it off if you want). You can take synchronous chats offline, switch to e-mail in asynchronous mode, re-open the chat again, add other co-workers and so on.
Another new way of working with documents is the possibility to reply anywhere in that document. You can start conversation like it would be a comment right at a specific point in the text. Makes it much easier do start conversations about a document or email without the endless “reply-to-all-with-history” threads.
With those features Google Wave for me is the first tool I worked with which really integrates synchronous and asynchronous communication. And there is a lot more in Google Wave. It is very simple to ad Gadgets or Robots to your Wave desktop and share stuff with your co-workers. I am not a programmer, so I am not the one who tests the API and writes code. But from what I can see there is a huge potential that Google Wave becomes a platform for collaborative applications on top of that new concept.
Finally I have to admit that I needed my time to get the message. First look at Google Wave caused confusion, and because it is Beta, it caused some crashes too. Safari did not really want to work with Wave, but Firefox did well. Sometimes using Google Wave slowed down my MacBook too much I had to close the browser app. And I really would like to test that stuff not in the closed sandbox environment. Lets see when they put it out in the wild.
I am very impressed, and looking at the collaborative solutions outside that I have seen and worked with the last 15 years, my guess is Google Wave will set new standards.
Unfortunatly I will not make it to attend DNUG this time. I guess this will be an interesting conference, and I wonder what Lotus executives will have to say about what is happening in Lotus land.
I guess IBM will announce to do things different. Regarding marketing we see some serious efforts made with the Smart Work campaign.
Still I think most of the non IBM / Lotus customers do not get the story. Maybe we will hear more about this tomorrow in Düsseldorf.
What we definetly will here about tomorrow is a special promotion for Lotus products with a significant 25% discount on new licences and reinstatements. Reduced prices will be available for a few months. IBM hopes to win back lost Lotus customers back into maintenance mode – and to win new customers from the dark site who are facing yet another large renewal bill for evil products like Exchange in Micrsofts fiscal Q4.
From my perspective there are two kinds of customers in the first category: The customers who discontinued maintenance will not reinstate, because they are happy with the pre-Notes 8 releases and they want to avoid upgrade of clients. Marketing will have to do a good job to convince these customers.
The second kind of customers are very happy about Notes 8, but they have maintenance and will not buy new licenses – because they simply don´t need to because business does not grow in these times.
In the second category it will be a hard sell too. License costs are only a small part of the budget for choosing a new messaging and collaboration infrastructure. But in some cases it might help.
In Germany we call this “Abwrackprämie” – a scrappage program for MS licences. Maybe 25% discount is real good argument 
I read a lot these days about Lotus Marketing – and most of the things are not really new for someone who has been in that business for years. Looking at the marketing campaigns IBM came up with the last years most of them were worse than the campaign before. Just remember the Codenauts! None of my customers got the message.
Today I stumbled upon Stuart McIntyre´s posting, and I think I should link to it because he put it the right way:
As the head of a 50-person ‘up and coming’ organisation from London that is faced with alternatives from Google, Socialtext, Jive, Huddle, Alfresco etc and little understanding of the Lotus portfolio beyond some buzz on the web about Lotus Connections or Quickr, I’d have walked away utterly confused at what IBM/Lotus was actually offering me or my business.
Nobody outside our little, very closed Lotus community understands what IBM is talking about today. Thats a big problem when a business partner tries to sell the message to it´s customers. I was one of these partners the last 10 years. And I wish IBM would have continued marketing like Lotus did in the past.
Today I work with people in IT organizations who are responsible for running large infrastructurs. They don´t even talk about Lotus. Lotus is something they know back from the old day – but it´s irrelevant today.
In my last position sometimes I felt like the last Jedi. But the force was not with me. Today I see some new efforts being made, including some of the videos of the Working Smarter campaign on Youtube. I would like to see Lotus back on the agenda of my current customers. And still I think: When IBM would like to do good marketing, they could do it. Maybe they simply don´t want to.
Two years ago our “After-Lotusphere-Trip” ended up in Anna Maria island, where we found a beautifull place at the Cedar Cove and watched the Pelicans for a few days.
This year we stranded in Boca Grande. And this is an unbelievable place. A small village with about 2500 citizens, no MacDonalds, no shopping malls. One hotel, one bakery, a few small shops. Nothing more.
Today we rented bicycles and drove down to the south end where the old lighthouse stands since more than 100 years. We were sitting on the dock of the bay watching the pelicans and the dolphins. And tonight we had the first really delicious dinner since we stayed in the US. What a wonderfull and extraordinary experience.
We could stay a few days more before we return to cold and dark Germany.
Lotusphere ended with a remarkable Closing Session. I have seen just one other guest speaker on my 11 Lotuspheres that fascinated the crowd like Benjamin Zander this afternoon. Like Patrick Stewart a few years ago people were really touched when Benjamin Zander spoke and sang with us – and made 3.000 Lotusphere attendees sing “Freude, schöner Götterfunken”, most of them not speaking one word of german. He is a fantastic speaker and motivator. Lots of things he said will be on my mind traveling now to the gulf coast.
Lotusphere was great. Still have to think about what the things coming up will mean to me. But now to something completly different…
Just watched this brilliant Lotusphere video again. Then I stopped it at this point:
Hey, this is a picture I took years ago at Lotusphere 2004! And they used it to build this video. Without asking! Hey guys, I want my royalties…
Wow, thats cold. Can´t remember temperatures below 0 Celsius at Lotusphere. But thats not the only thing that is different this year.
No customer meetings, no partner meetings. I am out of business. Not that bad at all. Can see all whats happening here from a different and much more relaxed perspective. No need to turn the stuff I learned into money immediatly.
Twitter. The use of Twitter has become essentially for me. Can´t believe it, because I was so sceptical about microblogging. But Twitter is THE source of whats going on at Lotusphere. I am not sure if really someone outside the Lotus community here reads Live Blogging streams from one of the sessions, but to stay up to date its perfect. When I look around on Laptops nearly everybody checks Twitter streams all the time.
Content: No big bang at the Opening Session. But a continuous information flow all over the week. I think much better than the years before. I liked the smaller keynotes. The Unified Communication & Collaboration keynote was the best I have attended. The only disappointment was the Social Software keynote. I don´t like that style. But some people find it funny. For me it was naiv.
Products. Lotus portfolio has grown too much. To many separate products. They should consolidate the product set. Just remember Allan´s great thoughts on that topic. But: I am happy to see many products becoming more and more mature. Most of the things that were promised at Lotusphere 2008 are now there and usable. Huge improvements for the social software product portfolio Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr. Hiuge improvements in the UCC product portfolio: All the things coming up in Sametime 8.5 will help IBM gaining new market share and deliver what they promised. Zero footprint web clients, no plugins, streamlined UI, many usefull new functions – Sametime Meeting Center is now a real competitor to WebEx & Co. Foundations: Hmm, still no idea when people in Germany will hop on that train. My thoughts on LotusLive remain unchanged. Necessary step, looks great, lets see how it evolves. Will test it in a real world situation this year.
Finally living in my Mac world without Lotus Notes as an one man company is still possible, even at Lotusphere. But learning from David Allen using Lotus Notes as his GTD tool makes me feel I will use Lotus Notes in the future again. Until then it would be great if Marco will release ebf.caldav server plugin to get what IBM should deliver: a calendar feed from Domino sources to use iCal even with an Domino backend.
See you at Universal Studios tonight.
So now it is official after the news leaked yesterday even before “Blogger´s Nachos & News Event“: IBM will implement ActiveSync protocol into Lotus Traveler. Timeframe is “this year”, which means end of 2009. So this is late, very late, but I do not want to complain too much. Finally IBM listened after last years IBM bashing.
With the implementation of ActiveSync they did it the right way. Now they could probably support Windows Mobile devices through active sync. And the question comes up why there are now two seperate ways of supporting Windows Mobile devices – SyncML and ActiveSync? Well, this all seems to be early stage, and we will see what we get end of the year. The new Traveler with ActiveSync will be integrated into the Domino 8.5 code stream. If customers want to enable iPhone sync they have to upgrade or at least setup one Domino 8.5 sync server as far as I understood.
For the Lotus Notes end user setting up his iPhone will be a strange experience:
He probably will have to choose Microsoft Exchange to enable sync with his Domino server. Can not imagine Apple adding other vendors to that list.
All in all a late but very good decision by IBM. I know many customers and especially executives who will love that announcment – if they be patient till end of the year.
There seem to be two main things people talk about in the hallways about this years news: XPages and “Click to Cloud”. While last years effort to meet the new requirements of a new IT world have been halfhearted this years announcments showed that IBM is serious about the cloud and the challenge to meet Google in the messaging and collaboration business.
With the announcement of the first partnerships (LinkedIn, Skype, Salesforce.com) and the acquisition of Outblaze there suddenly is momentum in the business. I think, this is an important and necessary move looking at the market where lots of companies currently testing and implementing services in the cloud. IBM thinks of these services as an extension of the existing corporate infrastructure to the cloud – so Business Partners and IT staff should not be scared.
But I think they should. The business model is changing fast. And extending an existing infrastructure seemless to cloud services does means its easy to move these services to the cloud too. The next step is only a small step if the first step works. So customers will move completly services like Mail, Instant Messaging, etc. to the cloud – and to the IBM datacenter.
What does that mean for Business Partners? Google has build a whole ecosystem around its cloud services. IBM has not. The Lotus partner ecosystem is mainly a Notes developer / admin ecosystem. They have to change and ask themselves how they can add value to LotusLive. With open standards, customers will not need anymore a “classic” Notes app to add an CRM service or a DMS service. Suddenly, the closed Lotus shop is an open shop. For many companies that provide today tools for managing Domino servers to its customers there will be no market if the servers are in IBMs cloud.
Again: From an IBM perspective this is a necessary step. IBM is focusing on solutions for its customers and not discussing the underlying technology. It does not matter for IBM if the Meeting Center technology behind LotusLive is Lotus Sametime or the scalable architecture the acquired to build the Unyte server. It even does not matter if Mail services are Notes based or Outblaze based – as long as it has one look and feel and is robust, open, scaleable.
I am very curious where this community will stand in two or three years and which will be the services business partners will provide.
Yesterday I registered for LotusLive and played around with it. I liked the interface, I registered my company and myself as a user. Worked well.
Today I wanted to try the other stuff that was shown in this mornings keynote. And it failed. Tried to open the file library. It took more than 20 minutes to open it. Then I tried to upload a file. Failed. So I tried to test the Instant Messaging capabilities:
Hmmm. OK, I have no Lotus Sametime client on my Macbook, so the only other way to use LotusLive Instant Messaging is the download option. This is what you get:
Imagine 160 MB download in this conferences WLAN. Looking at the URL, I know I will receive a Win32 only installer in the zip-file.
There seems to be some work to do.
So this is what we waited for at the Opening General Session yesterday. So probably IBM did not announce it in respect to strategic partner RIM.
Orlando, Fla. – IBM/Lotus for the first time ever will provide users of the iPhone and other mobile devices that support ActiveSync with real-time access to their email, calendars and contacts.
The company plans to announce on Wednesday that it will add support for Microsoft’s ActiveSync protocol, which will enable instant over-the-air email delivery to Apple’s iPhone 2.0 mail client and other handsets that support the protocol.
The ActiveSync technology will be added later this year to Lotus Notes Traveler, which provides real-time replication between mobile devices and Notes.
Meanwhile Sybase anounced full iPhone support too. So welcome iPhone to the other half of the corporate messaging world.
Time to wrap up the announcements from this mornings Lotusphere opening session. First we had a great start. Seated in beanbags right in front of the stage with access to a fixed LAN and power for our laptops was really great. IBM and especially Erica did a great job to make us feel comfortable. Beeing treated as a important person feels not that bad. And it was so much fun watching Twitter stream while having all the bloggers around me and commenting things that happened on stage.
This years OGS was different. This year IBM did not split the OGS like last year in two separat sessions. There was only one OGS, even if IBM claims to have 2% more visitors this year. Looking at the economic situation these are very good figures.
Although there was no big announcement this year nobody seemed to be bored. It was a well timed show, Blueman Group was really great – and Dan Aykroyd was, ok, at least a little bit funny. I enjoyed the OGS very much on my beanbag.
So what was in it this year:
Lotus Notes 8.5 shipped this month. Many new very cool features that I missed since a long time: iCal support in calendar, calendar federation, vCard handling in address book, (adress book federation coming in future releases!), and much more. XPages really revolutionizes the way of web development with Domino Designer. Mobile Device support in Domino Designer by helping developers easily manage different device resolutions and fit content for each device type. Lots of good news.
Breaking news for me: No Plugin download anymore when using the Meeting Center! This was in some customer situations the show stopper. Now it´s gone. Good move! And they did some improvements to cope with the firewall issues. I don´t know what exactly, but firewall issues have always been the second show stopper when offering Sametime as a webconferencing platform. Good news for those who compete with WebEx & Co.
LotusLive is available, I logged in and was really impressed. Have to check out later. But still I have my doubts how the channel should earn money with this. Will write a separate post about my thoughts.
So thats it for today. Will now join the Media Party and afterwards the JAMFest. Unfortunatly missed the Executive Q&A, but will read everything on Twitter, read it on blogs or hear the podcast lateron 
Did not know that front row seating for Bloggers would be THAT special when I read the invitation letter.
Photo by Volker.
Just attended the Press & Analyst briefing. Mick Moignard about Bob Picciano´s answer to the big question: what happened to DB2 support in Lotus Domino?
NSFDB2 is dead, or at least, isn’t going to be resuscitated, according to Bob Picciano himself. In the Press briefing, he was asked where it was going, and he confirmed that it’s going nowhere. The difficulties of managing Notes unstructured data in a structured storage backend are too great. Instead, and this is the good news, the effort is being refocussed on making NSF truly great as the best, and only way, to store and manage Notes data using the best that IBM have to maintain and improve NSF. The way that came over was very, very clear and the implications are very clear. NSF is the backbone of Notes and Domino, and Notes and Domino are the backbone, the centre, the flagship of the Lotus collaboration portfolio.
Just saw this list for the first time on Ed Brill´s INV102 slides:
Lotus Notes 8.5:
1. Drag/Drop of Text within rich text editor
2. Offline support for Activities
3. Choose from multiple addresses for a person in typeahead
4. Ability to make your own views look like the PIM views
5. Forward contact as vCard (along with better import/export)
6. iNotes improvements (e.g. calendar support in Lite mode)
7. Roaming user available with new file-based option
8. Support of ID Vault and Single Logon
9. Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) and Ubuntu Linux support
10. Calendar federation
Lotus Domino 8.5
1. Expanded platform choices
2. Increased reliability
3. Dynamic group policies
4. Improved router scalability
5. I/O use reduction
6. Domino Configuration Tuner (DCT)
7. Domino Designer for Eclipse (DDE)
8. XPages
9. ID Vault
10. Domino Attachment and Object Service (DAOS)
Ed provided some interesting additional numbers. Will add them later.
Still not able to connect to other Lotusphere attendees via Lotus Connections. At least it sends an invitation to connect – but with a huge list of Java errors.
I will not try to compete with all the Live Blogger & Twitters this morning. So here is simply my Twitter stream. I will blog about all my impressions this afternoon.
For now just follow #LS09 or @Lotusphere to see all the updates this morning. Got to go now to find my “bloggers´s den” sign for special seating in the front rows .
Since I do not use a Domino server for my mail anymore I was very curious to see how the iPhone optimized iNotes Ultralite looks like. Lotusphere Online Mail comes now in in three flavours: tall (Ultralite), grande (Lite) and venti (Full). And I like the Ultralite client: very fast, iPhone look & feel, easy to use. But: Why do I have the choice? Wouldn´t it be much easier if the application detects my device and fits the UI automatically?
Unfortunatly I will not use iNotes Ultralite. Most of the time I am offline over here only using WLAN where it is available because of the roaming charges. Downloaded my schedule now as iCal file. Sorry, iNotes Ulralite. If you have an offline sync, I will give you another try.
Last years trip to Orlando was worse. I had to spent the night in New York due to late arrival. This year I was on time – but I almost lost my sense of hearing. Eight hours of continuos chatting, crying and ranting on my right side.
I thought I had a reservation for a window seat, but when I arrived it was middle seat. Two russians on my right side, and the girl I had noticed before in the check in area in Frankfurt. Well, I love children, but I can not deny having thought about radical methods to stop that child from making me crazy. Her mother did not care. And her father was sitting very far away, different row, window seat of course. Probably my window seat.
So after 21 hours of travelling I arrived finally 2:00 a.m. Today I am not allowed to visit Business Development Day. I am press this year. So I will go shopping with Volker now and meet everybody tonight at the Welcome reception.
This year everything is different. Last 15 years I was part of the IBM Lotus business partner community. Now I am not. Last 15 years I worked with Lotus Notes. Now I don´t. But one thing remains the same: I travel to Florida end of January and visit Lotusphere 2009.
This year I am part of the Lotusphere 2009 Blogger Program.
“The Lotusphere 2009 Blogger Program combines access to press conferences, key IBM executives, and one-time-only events designed to show bloggers a side of Lotus/Lotusphere they have never seen before. Bloggers in the program will have special access to senior Lotus executives, an exclusive advance-look at some news items, early access to the exhibit hall, and of course lots of time to visit conference sessions and speak with customers and partners. There will be surprises along the way and lots of opportunities to network with IBMers and other attendees.”
So thank you IBM for inviting me. It will be a great pleasure for me to attend this conference and look at it from a different perspective – personally and from a business point of view.
Looking back preparation for Lotusphere was easy in the good old times. There was an official Lotusphere site and – much more important – Gonzos Unofficial Lotusphere site. That was it back then.
Today when I finished my work, changed my mood to “Lotusphere” and started crawling through all the different Lotusphere sources I was really confused: Lotusphere Blogs all over the place, offical and unoffical Twitter streams, LinkedIn Groups, …
First thing now: Manage my schedule. The last years the Lotusphere session database worked pretty well for me as a Lotus Notes user. This year I want to have it on my MacBook and on my iPhone. No Lotus Notes installed. This will be the first challenge for today.
One of the first emails in my Inbox this year: Lotusphere Online is open. Looks very good, most parts I visited are Domino based. A lot of session presentations are available as PDF. Schedule database is somehow slow, but building the schedule was much easier than last year when I had to fight a lot of errors.
Update: Well, ok then. My attempt to connect to Volker was denied by WebSphere Lotus Connections.
Since I left my old job in October and set up my new company I worked on so many Non-Lotus related things I nearly forgot about Lotusphere.
I have been to Lotusphere Orlando all the last years, I have visited Lotusphere Europe back in the old days – and I will be there 2009. Thanks to IBM I took the chance to see what´s next in the collaboration business. This time I will be there as a consultant, not as a reseller and software developer. My role has changed, probably my point of view, too.
I am happy to meet lots of people I know for years now. See you there in January.
KLUGE.DE ist die private Website von Alexander Kluge. Ich bin Berater an der Schnittstelle zwischen Informationstechnologie und Organisationsentwicklung. Ich lebe und arbeite in 
